STATE HOUSE ROUNDUP

By Matt Murphy STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE

Monday

Apr 8, 2019 at 10:00 AM

A recap and analysis of the week in state government.

The governor waded into the late-term abortion debate. District Attorney Rachael Rollins told the state's public safety secretary to buzz off. And education officials were pressured into removing a question from the MCAS exam that was deemed too racist for students to have to answer.

But, of course, the spotlight last week was hogged by a man in his 70s with a slightly orange hue who made a fortune off gambling and hotels. It was the Steve Wynn show.

Wynn wasn't even here, but it was his behavior and the lengths his eponymous company went to in order to conceal that behavior that turned the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center into the center of the #mapoli universe last week.

And that's because the stakes couldn't be higher.

More than seven years after Massachusetts politicians decided to legalize casino gambling, the Boston area is mere months away from seeing the doors to a gaming floor swing open, and still, it could all go up in smoke.

The Massachusetts Gaming Commission last week finally released the results of its investigation into how Wynn Resorts handled allegations of sexual assault against Steve Wynn, a 199-page virtual indictment of former Wynn executives who were found to have concealed the allegations from regulators.

Wynn Resorts did not dispute the findings, but what they did was assure commissioners that it was not the same company. The board has been swapped out. The CEO is new. An investigator even found that Wynn Resorts "did everything right" when an Encore Boston Harbor executive became the focus of two recent misconduct complaints.

So what's the Gaming Commission to do? For starters, they put new Wynn Resorts CEO Matt Maddox under the heat lamp, grilling him over why, as the prior president of the company, he either didn't know about the Wynn allegations or didn't think they were important enough to share with investigators.

"Right or wrong, and wrong actually, I never thought about it. I thought that what needed to happen was happening," Maddox said at one point, when asked if he had discussions about notifying the Gaming Commission.

The unanswered question, however, is whether the grilling Maddox endured was for show to lay the groundwork for the commission to, maybe, follow Nevada's lead, fine the company and move on, or are commissioners so serious in their frustration and anger that they're willing to take a step Attorney General Maura Healey has said they should not be afraid to take and tell Wynn Resorts they are no longer welcome in Massachusetts?

Mayor Pete Buttigieg had the opposite experience in Boston last week, the red carpet practically rolled out down Huntington Avenue as the likely presidential candidate paid a visit to Northeastern University. The South Bend, Indiana, mayor is having a moment in the Democratic primary race while U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is fighting to reverse the perception that her campaign is struggling to catch on.

"People look at demeanors. They hear the soundbites. They get bored, I think, after a short period of time so I think if anything she needs to figure out a better way to capture the essence of what her proposals are, because they are really good proposals on so many different issues," said Senate President Karen Spilka, a Warren supporter, last week.

Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton is still trying to figure out whether there will be a lane for him through the middle of the field with veterans and younger Democrats, and he was in Nevada testing his presidential message.

The message from Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins to Public Safety Secretary Tom Turco couldn't have been clearer -- Stay in your lane.

Rollins received a letter from Turco expressing the Baker administration's concerns with a half-dozen changes she's making that were part of a lengthy memo released making good on the justice reforms that were part of her successful 2018 campaign.

Among those changes, Rollins has told her prosecutors not to pursue misdemeanor charges for things like shoplifting and to significantly raise the bar for charging someone with intent to distribute drugs.

"My prosecutors distinguish between petty offenses and serious criminal conduct every single day, and I’d be happy to address his hypothetical concerns with some of our real world experience anytime he wants to pick up the phone," Rollins stated in a response to Turco's letter.

The new district attorney seemed to take issue with the fact that Turco wrote a letter that was released to the press without just calling her to talk it through.

Baker's team wasn't able to get Rollins to retreat on her memo, but the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education quickly backtracked on a question appearing on this spring's MCAS exam that asked students to write in the voice of character from Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize winning 2016 novel "The Underground Railroad."

The problem, according to the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the NAACP and others, is that the character whose voice students were asked to adopt is racist, and answering it had been "traumatic" for some students.

Though the department said the question has been fully vetted, Commissioner Jeff Riley notified schools within days of when he said he first received complaints from students and educators that the question would be pulled and not be scored.

The state has so far declined to release the actual question, and a coalition of groups argue the whole test should be invalidated for anyone who has taken it this year.

The governor, so far, has avoided getting drawn into a debate over racism in testing, but couldn't escape the abortion debate that his own party is fomenting.

New Massachusetts GOP Chairman Jim Lyons has latched on to a bill known as a ROE Act like a bear to a piece of salmon, issuing multiple statements labeling its proponents supporters of "infanticide" and launching a social media campaign against the 114 co-sponsors.

The bill would, among other things, legalize abortion in Massachusetts after 24 weeks in cases where doctors have diagnosed a fatal fetal abnormality making life outside the womb doubtful.

Unlike Lyons, Baker is pro-choice and bemoaned the "inflated language" used by all parties to the abortion debate, but he said he does not support late-term abortion.

Speaker Pro Tempore Patricia Haddad is a sponsor of the bill, and said she expected nothing less from Lyons, but Baker?